Car­mudi pre­dicts rise in stan­dard safety fea­tures

LA­HORE—Car­mudi.pk, lead­ing on­line ve­hi­cle mar­ket­place and au­to­mo­bile clas­si­fied por­tal, pre­dicts a shift to­wards in­te­gra­tion of more safety fea­tures in lo­cally pro­duced pas­sen­ger cars. Ac­cord­ing to Car­mudi Pak­istan, this shift may be grad­ual but there will be more cars equipped with ac­tive safety fea­tures –as per in­ter­na­tional stan­dards- in Pak­istan in the com­ing years.

One of the ma­jor fac­tors to fa­cil­i­tate this rise will be the grow­ing num­ber of im­ported cars, an on­line sur­vey by Car­mudi sug­gests. Newly ap­proved auto-pol­icy, low­ered fuel prices, and low in­ter­est rates have con­trib­uted to a hike in the num­ber of used im­ported cars. Re­ports sug­gest that the im­port of used cars in the first four months of this year was al­most dou­ble as com­pared to the same pe­riod last year. In­ter­na­tion­ally as­sem­bled cars usu­ally have more stan­dard safety fea­tures as com­pared to lo­cally pro- duced cars, for more or less the same cost.

This, in ef­fect, will cre­ate stiff com­pe­ti­tion for Pak­istani car as­sem­blers, com­pelling them to im­prove lo­cally pro­duced mod­els. Ad­di­tion­ally, in­crease in public aware­ness re­gard­ing road safety mea­sure­ments also in­di­cates growth in pur­chase of safer cars in the fu­ture.

As of now, seat belts on driver and pas­sen­ger seats are a stan­dard fea­ture in ev­ery do­mes­ti­cally pro­duced car, whereas other fea­tures such as airbags, fog lamps, An­tilock Brak­ing Sys­tem (ABS), and Elec­tronic Sta­bil­ity Con­trol (ESC) vary from one com­pany and model to an­other. Mar­ket sur­vey shows that Honda (Pak­istan) has the most num­ber of lo­cally as­sem­bled cars that are equipped with the afore­men­tioned fea­tures, other com­pa­nies have se­lect mod­els in­te­grated with more than one of these fea­tures. For ex­am­ple, Swift (Pak Suzuki) is the only model by the com­pany to of­fer anti-lock break­ing sys­tem as a stan­dard fea­ture.